LinkedIn is a popular networking platform for the business world. Learning how to leverage the power of it and dominate it is crucial for growing business relationships.
LinkedIn is one of the most useful social networks for business professionals. Its power comes from lead generation, market research, and global marketing. Increasing your participation and appearance on the network builds your influence and networking power.
In order to that, you need to know things such as:
- What info goes into a complete profile
- How to post and engage your audience to build relationships and connections
- Where and what types of articles to post
- Understanding and using LinkedIn analytics effectively
- How to set up and use LinkedIn Ads
- Why creating and participating in LinkedIn groups is necessary
Grow Your Following
Setting up your LinkedIn profile is the first step in growing your following. People follow others they know, admire, trust, and are more likely to recommend them to others. This begins with filling out your profile completely to include:
- Your name
- Your company name, if you are using business pages at LinkedIn-pages
- Your logo, branding image with tagline, or a cover photo
- The About You page
- Showcase Pages
- Fill out the Summary section with engaging content about you and your company.
- Focus on the top of your LinkedIn Profile, where your profile image, banner or cover image and a professional headline is. This is what people will see first.
- Create a customized URL. For example, set up your LinkedIn profile to be found
at www.linkedin.com/in/janedoe instead of the default one. - Your headline matters! The headline is seen next to your name on LinkedIn and on search engines. Use this chance to make a great first impression. Weave in snappy, interesting, keywords when possible.
Post to LinkedIn and Engage Your Audience
Posting consistently is a great way to grow your following. Post at least one update per day. You can share blog posts you’ve written, post updates about your industry or business, or share articles from other websites about your industry, or asking questions.
Keep these ideas and strategies in mind as well:
- Use relevant hashtags to help your content get discovered
- Share quality insights and fresh perspectives on trending topics
- Join other conversations and engage your own network by asking questions
- Invite people into your conversations by @mentioning them in the post.
- Use images and other rich media such as videos to draw people in and add life to your post.
Use curated content to build and engage your audience and grow your connections. Be sure to tell where the information came from, tagging the source of the content.
Join groups, create a group, and engage relevantly. Groups are a good way to find more customers, learn about your audience needs and wants and to network with others in your industry.
Post video content for greater engagement.
Reach out to connections to open up the lines of communication to begin finding and creating business opportunities.
Create LinkedIn Articles
LinkedIn has publishing platform that allows you to publish full length articles. This is a good place to share your knowledge and expertise in your field. Each article can include links, videos, and images. Articles can be any length but those that are longer around 500 to 1000 words get the best reception.
Tips:
- Use compelling headlines to promote click through
- Use cover photos for more engagement
- Use relevant keywords
- Cross promote on other social sites
- Publish consistently with fresh content
- Use PLR to create relevant articles and other forms of content.
Use Groups
Using LinkedIn groups can help you build connections and relationships. LinkedIn groups allow followers to stay up to date with your business. It’s the place you can post relevant topics, interact with your audience, and network in other groups in your industry.
LinkedIn Groups can be used to get a better understanding of your target customer, grow your reputation, and build relationships. You can use them to find potential mentors or future partners.
Use polished, well-crafted messages that capture your audience’s attention since this is the first impression Group members will have of you. Make sure the content is relevant to the group and is educational, not spammy.
While in Groups, consistently interact with the members by answering their questions, asking your own questions and other ways to spark meaningful conversations. But don’t
annoy them. Post different messages in the different groups instead of copy and pasting the same message in multiple ones.
Set up your own LinkedIn Group if your particular interest doesn’t currently have a group or you prefer to manage one with specific members you can approve. When creating your own group, set your privacy settings to Standard if you want to be found by everyone from the Search and Discover tab. If you prefer to invite specific people, set your privacy to Unlisted.
You can only send invites to people you are connected to. There is a limit on how many invites you can send at one time.
Understand Your LinkedIn Analytics
Knowing your demographics helps you create a content strategy that reaches the right people. LinkedIn lets it members understand and improve how the content they provide is being viewed and circulated. You can view the analytics for shared posts, videos and
published articles for insights on the impact it has on your network.
- You can see the amount of views and likes your content generates
- The number of reshares your articles videos and posts get
- Analytics shows your audience demographics including, where they work, job tiles, and their locations.
Article analytics are based on the number of views received, when someone clicked and opened your article, in their browser or the LinkedIn mobile app. Clicking and viewing your own article is also counted as a view, so don’t skew your results by clicking them too often.
Posts analytics are measured by when someone saw your post on their home page feed while videos are when someone viewed the video on their feed or clicked on the video.
Posts and video analytics are only available for 60 days from the time you create them while article analytics can be seen for two years. Analytics can only be seen after your post, article or video has been viewed by 10 or more unique viewers.
LinkedIn’s Page analytics are reserved for company pages. You can view your analytics on your dashboard.
The first section you see on your page Analytics is Visitors. It gives insight into who’s visiting your page but maybe not following it. You’ll see page views, unique visitors, and demographic breakdown.
This can help you see what kind of content initially brought visitors to your page. Use the information to figure out if there are ways you can add topics or adjust your content to get them to follow you.
Updates reveals how each individual post is doing. It provides information on
impressions, clicks, video views, social actions, engagement rates, and CTR. Use this date as an indication of what types of content is doing well.
The final section is the Followers section. This section provides you a zoomed in look at who is following your page. It gives you the breakdown of organic versus acquired (through sponsored content). It gives the demographic data including geography, job function, seniority, industry, company size, employment status, and function. Toggle between these by clicking the dropdown menu.
Use this section to help you plan your content that you share on LinkedIn.
Ins and Outs of LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads are a way to boost your content by promoting your company updates to targeted audiences across multiple devices. LinkedIn Ads can help you generate leads, send people to a specific service or product.
With ads, you can market to LinkedIn members who have visited your website with website retargeting. Ads allow you to upload and integrate your current lists of contacts with contact retargeting. And, you can reach the decision makers of your target accounts using LinkedIn Ads account retargeting.
There are two ways to collect leads using LinkedIn Ads. The first is by sending them to your landing page where you offer a something for free. The second one is using LinkedIn’s feature, Lead Gen Forms. These are pre-filled with accurate LinkedIn profile data that shows you their professional information in just a couple of clicks. It’s available for Sponsored InMail and Sponsored Content.
Last but not least, use the knowledge you’ve gained from this guide, as well as the tips and additional information in the templates to help you create and implement sound strategies and processes to dominate LinkedIn.